The Watermill Center will present a show of the work of the California artist Mike Kelley, who died this year, beginning at its benefit on Saturday night. The tribute to the artist will be open through Sept. 16, by appointment on the center’s Web site. A $20 donation will be suggested; $10 for students.

    The exhibition, organized by Harald Falckenberg, a Kelley expert, is being presented in collaboration with the Luma Foundation. It ranges from early soundtrack and video works from the late ’70s and ’80s through Kelley’s more recent “Kandor” project, based on the Superman comic series. The show will take over the building’s south wing.

    The artist was known for his use of discarded objects and “low” materials to create complicated and often scatological compositions, with stuffed animals as sculptural objects. He also produced videos, paintings, wall drawings, and installations of complicated environments such as offices or restaged historical events. A major retrospective is planned for Amsterdam, and will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2014.

     Tomorrow, the center will also benefit from a screening of the film “Heaartbeat,” a documentary on John Chamberlain, to be shown at the Art Southampton fair. The event will help launch the Watermill Center/John Chamberlain Residency Fund to benefit the center’s year-round Artist Residency Program, which provides a setting and support for young and emerging artists to explore and develop their work. Susan Davidson, the curator of the Chamberlain retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum this past spring, will speak about the artist’s life and work.

   Somewhere between the edgy nihilism of Holden Caulfield and the playful insurgency of Ferris Bueller, there was Benjamin Braddock, the 1960s misfit hero of “The Graduate,” now playing at the Southampton Cultural Center until Sunday.

    The momentous movie, released in 1967, was based on a novel by Charles Webb and adapted for the screen by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham (who both submitted screenplays but did not actually collaborate), and directed by Mike Nichols, who earned an Oscar for his innovative style. It featured the songs of Simon and Garfunkel on the soundtrack, an album that, upon its release, dislodged the Beatles’ “White Album” from the number-one slot. The movie has frequently turned up on the American Film Institute lists as one of the most important films of the 20th century, capturing young people’s desperate search for meaning on the eve of the counterculture movement.

    This stage version, adapted by Terry Johnson, was first presented on the West End in London and found a home on Broadway a decade ago, offering several new scenes.

    “The Graduate” follows Benjamin, an upper-middle-class college graduate who has returned to his parents’ home in California for the summer with no particular plans. He is drawn into an affair with one of his parents’ friends — libidinous, alcoholic Mrs. Robinson, the original cougar, only to meet and fall in love with the Robinsons’ daughter, Elaine, when she returns from Berkeley.

    The Southampton production, directed and designed by Michael Disher, offers up a set featuring a series of white doors interspersed with white louvers, a very modern 1960s look, dappled with light and a clean efficiency. Songs like “The Girl from Ipanema” and “Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying” add to the feeling that this is, indeed, California circa 1964.

    Vincent Carbone excels in his role as Benjamin, the part made famous in the screen version by a young Dustin Hoffman. Mr. Carbone manages to both shuck the Hoffmanesque archetype and add layers of likable neuroticism to a character once deemed “an insufferable creep” by Roger Ebert.

    All that bored Benjamin wants is to be around “simple, honest people,” a seeming impossibility until Elaine Robinson returns. Elaine — played disarmingly by Bethany Dellapolla — describes herself as a “plain ordinary person,” but she manages to bring out the humanity in Benjamin, in a stripper she meets, and even — for a moment — in her mother, played with cool control by Brooke Alexander.

    The stage production sparkles with life and humor, more energized and less dark than the film, with a welcome depth added to the characters of the Robinson women in additional material that offers a glimpse into what may have made Mrs. Robinson who she is.

    Benjamin’s parents are portrayed by John Tramontana and Barbara Jo Howard, who manage beautifully to balance their concern over their son’s future with their own self-centeredness. If it were 10 years later they would be popping Valium and trying Est. Seth Hendricks plays the cuckolded Mr. Robinson with a touching combination of authority and desperation, with a little bit of crazy eyes thrown in.

    The cast is rounded out with Steward Mead in a variety of small roles, and Julia King in a small but significant role as the stripper.

    Mr. Disher does a terrific job of keeping the production moving at a snappy pace, and the cast delivers a sterling performance, led by Mr. Carbone, Ms. Alexander, and Ms. Dellapolla. Without spoiling the ending, it is different from the film, and seems to dilute that original message, but a message is there nonetheless — just who is the graduate, anyway?

    Perhaps Elaine, who learns to assert herself, or Benjamin, who finally takes command of his life, can share the title together.

   Kevin Breslin’s short documentary “#whilewewatch” was shown last Thursday night at Guild Hall. The film, shot within the Occupy Wall Street protest at Zuccotti Park in September, was the latest in Guild Hall’s Red Carpet film series.  

    The author Steven Gaines moderated a question-and-answer session at the end of the film. During the session, a bearded man of a certain age, who identified himself as being part of the Occupy movement, first berated Mr. Breslin for referring to the woman who coined the “1-percenter” slogan as being “Oriental.” “The word is ‘Asian,’ ” he shouted. The filmmaker apologized for his political incorrectness.

    Later the man raged against the machine: “We don’t need your system,” or some such; the system in this case being a well-meaning independent filmmaker and moderator. Mr. Gaines, resorting to humor, told the man he had no dog in the race, that he had simply agreed to a request to moderate, and that by doing so he was in danger of missing the new “Batman” premiere.

    For a reviewer who came of age during the protests of the late 1960s and early ’70s, the angry man sounded a bit like Don Quixote raging against a windmill that no longer turns. 

    Mr. Breslin’s film is provocative, but in unexpected ways. The occupiers talk about being “citizen journalists,” telling a story that they say the established media, co-opted by Wall Street and all things corporate, is missing completely.

    Instead of placing flowers in the barrels of rifles pointed at them, they challenge police with their iPhone video apps, shouting, “The whole world is watching,” not on television but on their computers. Well, maybe. More likely the world is busy getting its Facebook fix, or watching Arab citizen-journalists’ reportage of their life-and-death struggles.

    I was struck by the narcissism of the movement. Pointing up the injustice and criminality responsible for the yawning gap between the 1-percenters and the 99-percenters is a worthy cause. Unfortunately, Mr. Breslin’s honest reportage found the occupiers not only preaching to the choir but, in full citizen-journalist mode, reporting on their own preaching.

    Of course, it’s harder to foment antiestablishment  fervor when the president of the United States is protesting the same thing the protesters are. Very strange.

    And, where’s the hatred? As many will recall, the thing about the antiwar and civil rights protests that took place from about 1967 through the end of the Vietnam War — protests that spawned the “counterculture” — was the pure hatred generated by establishment types.

    The Occupy movement is a sort of caricature of a protest. Occupiers are marching (occupying) against the machine, but the machine doesn’t care. It seems that except for hedge funds and banks, most of the machine is on its ass.

    Mr. Breslin’s documentary kept begging the question: If one is really angry about what Wall Street has done, why occupy a private park instead of invading the Stock Exchange or storming the Goldman Sachs bastille?

    This also points up something I think about quite a lot, form versus content in the digital age. Occupiers had the means to be citizen-journalists to get out to the world the raw, on-the-street stuff, the straight skinny unadulterated by corporate spin, but the struggle wasn’t there, except for a few man-made dustups with New York’s finest, who, as middle-class types, probably had as much reason to protest the 1-percenters as the occupiers.

    Don’t get me wrong, the movement was and is important. The occupiers are saying what a lot of Americans feel strongly. But it’s difficult to “out” the unethical, greedy mother*&)+@!s, when the whole world already knows they’re unethical, greedy mother*&)+@!s.

    The government knows it, the people at large know it. Even the greedy mothers know it, which is why they don’t help with the narrative by fighting back. As a result, the choir winds up filming themselves in the mirror.

    By offering what the occupiers insist they don’t want and don’t need — that is, a comprehensive view of the movement from the outside — Mr. Breslin succeeds in shedding much needed light on very worthy motives.

   As an art photographer, Mary Ellen Bartley may have had a long gestational period, but after finding her muse not all that long ago, her career has taken off on a steady upward trajectory.

    Her still-life images of books have been recognized five times in Guild Hall member shows, four years in a row for best photograph, and this year with top honors by Lilly Wei, a critic for Art in America and other publications. In return she will receive a solo show at Guild Hall in 2014.

    Ms. Bartley was also chosen by Ross Bleckner to exhibit her work with him and Renate Aller at the Parrish Art Museum’s “Artists Choose Artists” show last summer. The two have struck up a friendship and they have spoken about him dropping by her house in Wainscott to catch up on her latest work.

    “Things have definitely been happening in the last few years. It’s been a good time,” she acknowledged while seated at her kitchen counter last month. “Being out here has been so great,” she said of the shift she and her family made seven years ago to live full time in Wainscott after living part time in Springs for 14 years.

    She loves the community and the art institutions of the South Fork. “It’s magical that all these connections are happening. I love these places.” A show of her work along with that of Costantino Nivola will open in August at the Drawing Room in East Hampton, a place she has also long admired.

    While she goes to Beach Lane every day to take pictures with her dog, the bodies of work she is known for are quite minimal. They include the stark allusions to still life through the filter of Giorgio Morandi in her “Paperback” series, and the quiet, fleeting, and cryptic homages to some of her favorite artists in her “Open Book” series.

    She doesn’t much like to talk about the food photography she did prior to committing full time to art photography around the time she relocated here permanently. Although it gave her the inspiration and discipline to pursue still life, it was more of a distraction that kept her from her own work.

    During that time, she said, “I started some series as bodies of work, but when I was doing editorial work I found, being here, that it was difficult to shift gears.” Pretty soon after the move her focus changed. “I found my practice. It became a daily thing. Then, things started to happen.”

    She needed the separation and the extra time. “My work is about looking at things slowly and carefully. I can’t do that with breaks. I’m not a multitasker.”

    She spoke of finding her various inspirations as somewhat magical events. “I had to find a muse, something that would keep my interest that I could go back and look at differently. I tried a lot of different still-life things, but the books work best for me because of their geometry. I’m a minimalist at heart.” Yet, there was an element of conceptualism there, too. “Books contain so much narrative and information, but I was looking at them in a way that denied that at the beginning. Then I started opening them up.”

    The “Paperback” series came from seeing a pile at a friend’s house. Although she liked the purity of the geometry of the books themselves as they lined up in stacks, she found the black line drawn on some of the used books particularly arresting. “I liked all the space and formal connections,” she said, and they reminded her of works by Rachel Whiteread and Wayne Thiebaud, artists known for a certain geometric purity even in their more excessive works.

    Prior to that, she was working on a series of “Blue Books,” which she continues to work on today. The title is quite literal. So many older books are bound in blue covers. She composes them into groupings then photographs them in low light on a blue background. The results are lushly textural prints that have a visual finish like blue suede and subtle shifts in tones that seem much more painterly than photographic.

    While these prints are produced digitally, she said she still works occasionally with the older large-format view cameras she used in college, when she made palladium prints. She recently purchased some 4-by-5 negative film, even though she still plans to print those images digitally. With the inkjet printers, “I feel like I can get a similar quality of subtle transition of tones that I wasn’t getting in regular black-and-white prints.” She said, however, “I think like a view-camera person. When I first looked through one and saw the flattening of space and the quality it has of drawing with light, I thought it was so cool. It was my aha! moment. I thought, ‘I have to do this.’ ”

    A subtle but rather radical departure came in the “Open Book” series. In looking for other ways to portray her “Paperback” series, Ms. Bartley began to stand them up to show them vertically, which led to their sometimes splaying open. It was then she noticed the shadows, stripes, and strong verticals that were the byproducts of seeing just a small glimpse of what was contained within.

    “The text didn’t excite me. I liked when I saw images this way. I played around with the depth of field. I would make the page sharp but the rest dissolved. I liked how there was a re-sequencing of the book by seeing the images out of order.”

    Her treatment also changes the basic functions of the books. In a Hiroshi Sugimoto monograph of beachscapes, the page numbers, which float in the center at the right end of the page, take on a different, mysterious significance when only a few are apparent. The similar horizon line in the glimpses of images within gives them a quality like an accordion-folded print of a Rothko composition.

    In this series, she has done a number of photography books but is also looking at books with reproductions of paintings. It is a different effect and not just because of the addition of color that is often absent in the photo books she chooses. There is a tenderness and an ethereal quality to them, almost reverential. Some of this is the depth of field she spoke of, but it is also the soft northern light of her bedroom, where she takes these images, that embraces and softens them.

    She always titles the works after the book title and said her intent is homage and is in no way cynical. “I came of age right behind the ‘Pictures Generation’ and all that media-centered art didn’t appeal to me. I thought art was sacred. I would sit in front of a Rothko for hours, thinking, ‘Give me your wisdom.’ ”

    What excites her about the “Open Books” is the element of chance that comes into play as to just what can be seen in this presentation. The “Paperbacks” are marked by precision and control. “This series connects to things outside of myself and outside of the room.”

    She began her work with books before digitization of them became big business and said it was not a concern of hers when she started this work. Still, as technology has made the book an increasingly outmoded and sacred object, she has taken note. She likened it to a weird inversion of Walter Benjamin’s notion of an original object’s aura compared to a serially-made copy.

    In this context, “the book has its own aura. It’s original in its own way. The form of a book, its format, is so specific and in real time. You have to hold it open and move the pages. It’s not flashing on a screen, not in the ether ready to be experienced by anyone. It’s a much more intimate experience. It’s sort of quaint now.”

    As precious as those objects are to her, she is beginning work on a new unreleased series in which she is rephotographing images she has taken at the beach all these years, in one case folding them and having the light hit one side more than the other. This approach allows her “to think of it more as a still life, like the books. I like it and it’s fun. To be continued,” she said with a smile and closed the portfolio.

August, I walk this shore in search of wholeness

among snapped razor clams and footless quahogs.

How easily my palm cradles a moon shell

coughed up on shore. I stroke the fragments

as, last night, I stroked your arm

smelling of salt, scrubbed clean by the sea air.

Once you loped near me. Now, in my mind’s eye,

your rubbery footsoles track sand hills

the shape of waves you no longer straddle.

You inch forward, step, comma, pause,

your silences the wordless rage of pain.

But still at night our bodies merge in sleep

and fit unbroken, like the one perfect shell

I’ve never found and can only imagine —

and crack when we’re apart. I clutch the moon shell,

guardian of unknowing, chipped and silent,

until I fling it down and feel its loss.

Broken, it fit my hand and I was whole.

This poem previously appeared in The Kenyon Review. Grace Schulman, who lives part time in Springs, has a new collection of poems, “Without a Claim,” coming out in the fall of 2013. She will read from her work at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Aug. 4 at 5 p.m.

   After its second go-round on the grounds of the Bridgehampton Historical Society, the artMRKT fair announced steady sales and 7,000 visitors during its run from July 19 through 22.

   Max Fishko, who founded the fair with Jeffrey Wainhause in 2011, said in a release that this year’s event “once again proved that there is a need and a great opportunity for a contemporary fair like artMRKT.” He also let it be known that the pair would be planning another one for next year.

   The fair enticed some notable attendees, including Jon Bon Jovi, Edie Falco, and Nina Garcia. Some dealers, like Kevin Havelton of Aureus Contemporary, reported selling out of their largest works.

   Karen Boltax of Shelter Island sold a Regina Scully canvas and a work on paper in addition to works by Peter Opheim, Sylvia Hommert, and Jackie Black. Arte Nova, an Italian gallery, sold a large-scale photo by the renowned photographer Massimo Vitali. Morgan Lehman reported sales of several works by Nancy Lorenz and David Allee, a photographer, and as a result of participating has several clients doing studio visits with Ryan Wallace, a painter.

Forty-one galleries took part this year, an increase over last year’s 35. The founders produce four fairs around the country each year, the others in Houston, Miami, and San Francisco.

   Tomorrow at 8 p.m., a staged reading of “The Glint” by Matt Hoverman will be presented at Guild Hall. Directed by Lonny Price, who just oversaw the production of “Luv” at the John Drew Theater, it will star Richard Benjamin, John Ratzenberger, and Aya Cash. Tickets are $30, $28 for members. The play is about men at 60 who refuse to give up their dreams of success, both in their  careers and with women.

     On Saturday night at 8, “Detropia” will be screened as part of the Hamptons International Film Festival SummerDocs series in partnership with Guild Hall. Alec Baldwin will host the screening and discuss the film with its filmmakers, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. The cost is $22, $20 for members. The film is about the decline of Detroit and how the city may be making a comeback.

    “#whilewewatch,” a documentary film by Kevin Breslin, will be featured at 8 p.m. tonight at Guild Hall in East Hampton as part of the John Drew Theater’s Red Carpet film series. There will be a talkback discussion with the director after the film.

    Mr. Breslin directed the award-winning “Living for 32,” the story of Colin Goddard, a survivor of the massacre at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007. The film was about how Mr. Goddard’s terrible experience caused him to advocate for changing the liberal gun laws in this country.

    In “#whilewatch,” Mr. Breslin takes the viewer to the birthplace of the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in Zuccotti Park in New York City and quickly spread, despite a lack of attention on the part of the major media, Mr. Breslin said. It was that fact that drew his attention to the movement. The director said his film is “what democracy looks like. We hear it from their voices, pain, energy, and honesty.”     Tickets cost $22 for the general public, $20 for Guild Hall members.

   “Good times,” yelled Inda Eaton to the Stephen Talkhouse crowd last Thursday — which she is indeed known for creating, with her music, raspy soulful voice, truthful storytelling, and sense of humor.

    With a gift for connecting with an audience, Ms. Eaton, who has lived in East Hampton for seven years, showed the locals she gets it, saying how thankful she was for being able to walk into the I.G.A. after the frantic holiday weekend “and load up for next weekend.”

    “I do tend to talk,” she told the crowd, and she does, whether it’s between songs or between phrases. Generating laughs and smiles with her stories, she takes the stage with a go-with-the-flow attitude, as when she decided she wanted piano accompaniment and sang out for Joe Delia, scheduled to perform next, to come from the green room and play. The show’s end-time was decided by asking the audience, “Are there 70 20-year-olds lined up outside?” Then “Bring in the Bonackers!” she shouted. “We need the liquor sales!”

    “I feel sorry for the rest of America that doesn’t have a Talkhouse,” Ms. Eaton said. “We can just stop by and see our favorite band, even on a Thursday night.”

    Last week, Ms. Eaton sang selections from her eighth and newest album, “Go West.” In September she will do just that, in her mobile studio, “Delmer,” for a tour. “I absolutely love a road trip,” she said on Monday morning, “wandering around gas stations, eating crap you never eat. It feels so free — no past, no future.”

    To raise money for the cross-country tour, the artist has launched a campaign on Kickstarter.com, a funding platform for creative projects, with a goal of $25,000 to pay for gas, graphics, and marketing. The adventure will become a documentary film, including not only shows and interviews but “handshakes, hugs, and barbecues.”

    With 17 days left on the Kickstarter site as of Monday, Ms. Eaton had 26 backers who had contributed $4,140. A $10 minimum pledge gets the donor a digital download; thank-yous go up and up from there to include an autographed vinyl record and Indawear T-shirt, a beach bonfire dinner for four prepared by Inda, private house parties, a song written and recorded for the donor, and advertising space on the 32-foot tourmobile.

    Ms. Eaton has been performing her mellow acoustic, country western, and rock music around the country for years, opening for acts such as the Blues Travelers, Hootie and the Blowfish, LeAnn Rimes, and Molly Hatchet. Yes, she said, “It is exciting working for bigger artists,” but what she’s doing now on the grassroots level “feels so good.”

    “We played the Whaling Museum the other day, oh my god it was delicious,” she said. A room of talented musicians, and about “30 people . . . hanging on every note of every song.

. . . To play and be part of that, it doesn’t get any better.”    

    Her plan is to hit key cities, playing in clubs, and living rooms too, for those who have pledged for it, with a focus on the cities where those on the record have ties, including Milwaukee, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. The album was recorded over three days by Cynthia Daniels at Monk Music Studio in East Hampton, with Eve Nelson on piano, B Rehm-Geredes on guitar, Jeffrey Smith on drums and percussion, and Curt Mychael on bass. Local artists also graced the recording, with thumbprints from Nancy Atlas, Caroline Doctorow, Lee Lawler, and Randolph Hudson III. The whole project has been “one big miracle,” Ms. Eaton said, made on a shoestring, promoted and produced on a grassroots level.

    The tour will probably extend through October, with a return to East Hampton in time for an October show at Guild Hall with Nancy Atlas and Caroline Doctorow. The three women are friends, and get together regularly. “All of us absolutely love music and love to cook,” said Ms. Eaton. She predicted that the show will be “intimate, acoustic, and raw.”

    Ms. Eaton began her career as a classical pianist in Casper, Wyo., but by the time she entered Boston University the portable six-string was her instrument of choice. “Coffeehouses and college stairwells proved difficult with a piano,” she said on her Web site.

    Over the years, she has endured several medical tribulations, including a hip replacement following a car accident and cerebral malaria, which she contracted in Africa.

    “Without the soundtrack,” she said, “I couldn’t function. That is the way to get through the trying times. It’s the nicest benefit of things going to hell.”    Ms. Eaton was working in New York City before coming to the East End. A voice-over project here for CMEE, the children’s museum, introduced her to the area. She still does some voice-over and production work, she said, including co-writing and producing a Julie Andrews song for one of her books, “The Great American Mousical.”

    Ms. Nelson captures “the best of what I do,” she said, calling the pianist “a brilliant musician, a savant really. She has been able to combine her pop sensibility with my raw live energy.” She also paid tribute to Ms. Daniels, calling her “the cool hand at the controls to not screw up the vibe, to encourage it, and to get the sound quality right.”

    Always down for combining her talents with others, Ms. Eaton will play tomorrow at the Wolffer Estate wine stand with Lee Lawler (Mama Lee), Scott Hopson, and Jeff Marshall. On Saturday, she will play for the wounded warriors and the Soldier Ride participants at a picnic at Ocean View Farm in Amagansett, and on Aug. 29 she will be back at the Talkhouse, just before she hits the road.

    “With the amount of effort and love and joy put into this project, it’s a great reason to go out and celebrate it,” she said. “Life is short. When a creative project comes along that allows you to have fun, break bread, talk about the truth, whatever that is to you — I can’t ask for anything more.”

   It was a Thursday afternoon, and Monica Banks was home listening to NPR. But it could have been any day, really, as long as she was at work in her East Hampton Village studio or in the workroom she keeps in her house.

    The fact that the artist works to the jumbled sounds of nations crumbling, world economies sputtering, talking heads debating health care reform, or, perhaps in lighter moments, the poignant oral histories of “Storycorps” resonates in her artistic output and seems to urge her along in her practice.

    While it can be seen literally in her recent series “Backstory,” it manifests itself in her “Cloud” sculptures, too, with their random yet obsessively attached doodads and whoziwhatzits: a tangle of buttons, dead insects, plastic mini-figures she has reformed into Centaur-like juxtapositions, and all manner of junk drawer marginalia. The “Clouds” are beautiful and sad in their colorful maximal-ism just as the stark white mini-figures of “Backstory” are in their minimal way.

    Speaking about “Backstory” recently at her house and studio, she said she was moved to begin the series after the earthquake in Haiti, and hearing about the dead bodies, the mass graves, and the disease and devastation on that island.

    If she is influenced by current events in that series, it is history she mines for the other. The “Clouds” come from “boxes of stuff from my childhood room and then I process my childhood with my current life with things like dog hair and dryer lint.”

    The artist is still pursuing both series, and she has another one in development. Yet the themes in “Backstory” seem to have the most resonance for her, no doubt for their strong emotional impact and as a way “to figure things out.” The themes of Haiti echo in many news stories past and present from Syria, Bosnia, Rwanda, to New Orleans after the hurricane, even the death toll of AIDS, she said. “I became compelled to make these tiny bodies.”

    First they were just piles assembled in shadow boxes in the manner of a mass grave. The bodies were generalized with few discernible features. “There’s a transition now from less piles of figures to fewer, but more in agony.” She realized recently that the change in approach was inspired by the Pompeii exhibit brought to New York in 2011 and the casts of dead bodies in the last gasp of their lives.

    “You often don’t know what your influences are until you realize it as you’re working. Then you think, ‘Oh, of course, that moment of life and death, that agony, that’s even more compelling.’ That was a turning point for me.” These figures are collaged on a board, as a relief, but she also organizes them in ways inspired by some of her favorite painters. Jasper Johns’s “Target” series and Mark Rothko’s layered color planes are some of her sources. The figures can be long and lean, short and stout, or any combination in a variety of poses, all evoking pain of some kind. “We always want to tell ourselves that people rest in peace, but it’s hard to buy sometimes.”

    Still another manifestation of the same theme is a group of works she has done that are just fragments of those figures, very small body parts or bones, too tiny and generic to be mentally catalogued, as in this is an arm here, or a jawbone there, but utterly recognizable when seen as part of the series. They are the same bodies, but just breaking down and fading from our view and memory over time.

    The idea of all these dead forms sounds disturbing or even creepy at first pass, but the actual execution is beautiful and full of humanity and reverence. She works in white clay for the figures and gray backing, which is somber and pure. “The material and scale came completely out of emotion. I didn’t set out to do anything visually, it came out of feelings of helplessness” that arose from her reaction to these tragedies.

    Along with the grander worldview, there is a personal side as well to the emotion they bring to the viewer. “It goes from the political to the personal. We’re not all teetering between life and death, but we all feel pain. I was trying to dignify the anonymous victims of natural and human-caused disasters and sanctify the pain we all feel as part of life. . . . It’s why the figures are so small and in a box and protected. They’re important.”

    Ms. Banks was doing completely different work in steel only a few years ago. She still has some works in progress in her studio, but the clay work has brought a new dimension to her sculpting. “I bought the clay because I wanted to try something different that I was not comfortable with. . . . Clay is a different sensation than steel where you’re always wearing gloves and have to be careful with a torch.”

    The hands-on feeling and its primordial nature appealed to her. She had purchased the clay before the earthquake and was working on figures as a reaction to the health care reform debate, after hearing stories of people getting sick and how the existing system failed them. They were larger figures then, but the same suffering, injustice, and cruelty she felt listening to those stories translated rather easily to the next phase of her explorations of human trauma.

    As the artist revealed her work in the workroom in her house and on the walls of her living area, a hanging mini curtain on the wall of her dining room attracted attention. The piece, two feet or so square, looked from afar as if it were made from mica sheets or some other thin, translucent substance. Up close however, it became immediately obvious that they were actually teeth on 256 little rectangles of X-ray film joined to each other by wire and then attached to a hanging rod.

    They are simultaneously beautiful, mysterious, elemental, sad, and eerie and are another natural extension of the artist’s aesthetic as well as the themes of “Backstory.” Called “Remains,” these were quite new works, just begun in the spring. She started collecting them a few years ago when she saw her dentist’s office throwing out the old films as they went digital. “I just said no, I have to have them. They are so evocative.”

     She said at first she wasn’t sure how they related to the other work, but she remembered the stories of teeth being pulled from the victims of the Holocaust and she thought that the white clay she was working in also looked like teeth. She acknowledged that teeth are often used to identify victims of accidents and disasters who might not be able to be identified in other ways. “It makes everyone special and different, an identifying feature.”

    She is still working on the other series and there were examples of works in progress in the house.

    Of the X-ray films, she has started to cull the children’s teeth images for a piece featuring just them. “That’s even more powerful to me, the idea of little children and being exposed to radiation.”

    The films feel to her “like a natural progression. Without the context they are probably not as powerful, but they still work on their own.” She had the films for a couple of years before she knew what to do with them. “They’re funny but disturbing, intimate, and anonymous, but I never thought beforehand, ‘Oh gee, if I can only get my hands on a few thousand dental X-rays.’ ”